Communication expert Garr Reynolds who is also the author of the best seller Presentation Zen has a three-step advice. Prepare, Design, and Deliver. In the design phase, he nudges presenters to use video and audio when appropriate.

Using video clips to show concrete examples promotes active cognitive processing, which is the natural way people learn.

The idea is to sidestep the corny and use the right kind of media to create a visual story. A good multimedia asset changes the pace of your presentation and can immerse the audience in your storytelling. Of course, keep it short and sharp around your main theme.

It is an art. It can be mastered. And so, like any art project, you need your supplies. Let’s scour the web for the best places to get cool media clips you can use in your PowerPoint presentations.

Effects with Free Sound Clips

The old world of PowerPoint slides filled with bullet point statements will be replaced by a new world of examples via stories, accompanied by evocative images and sounds.–Dana Atchley

This site for royalty free music and sound effects is neatly categorized. There are more than 2000 free sound WAV files you can dip into. But the best part of the site after the free label are the filters. Sort through the sounds by length and loop.

I wanted to end one of my presentations with a “Beam me Up, Scotty” sound clip from Star Trek. I got the 11 KB file from here. The site still has that classic old look, but it is a rich dump of sound clips from movies, TV, commercials and some special effects types too.

The site has a search page, so it is easy to get to your sound clip if you know exactly what you are searching for. The separate tabs for sound clips from movies, TV, commercials, and FX should make your job easier.

This is a crowdsourced music site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. It includes many tracks with non-commercial sharing licenses and some under sampling licenses. Dig into the experimental genres for themes and looping backgrounds.

The site hasn’t changed its look. But behind the old façade, it has kept on updating its collection of effects. From prankish sounds (give the farts a miss in your PPTs) to cool sound effects, this site has a good collection. With the tiny sound clips you can add sound effects to your buttons or transitions. Sound clips fall under royalty-free and free sounds.

Free Movie Clips for PowerPoint

There’s plenty to choose from the world’s largest reservoir of free videos. It is so big that other videos websites often host their collections on YouTube itself. You just have to do three things – think about the right kind of video to showcase on a slide. Then, search YouTube to find the aptest video. Finally, download the YouTube video and embed it in your presentation.

Remember, Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 makes it easy to insert a YouTube video. If you didn’t know it yet, you can also use the Insert Video field to search for a video from within the PowerPoint itself.

If you are thinking of an educational PowerPoint slide, then try the Internet Archive. Okay, try it for everything else too because it holds classic full-length films, alternative news broadcasts, cartoons, concerts, and many other archival materials behind its vault doors.

The 1654 videos pale in comparison to YouTube but do check it out if you are lookingfor historic videos under a Creative Commons license.

Try the Pixabay search engine for free public domain resources of all kinds. No attribution is required. The collection is small, but the videos relate to specific stock footage categories. Scroll down to the foot of the page to filter by category. They include everything from Animals to Vacation.

You will find that most of the assets are hosted on Vimeo and therefore are high resolution.

A community of videographers upload their work and you can grab them for free. Videezy is a site for free HD stock videos and other kinds of footage. Do check the license under each video before you use it in your presentation. Enter keywords or browse by category to find the clip.

Add Comic Strips for Humor

I would pick cartoons from Dilbert to add a bit of fun to my somber business slides. But Scott Adams would drag me to court for using cartoons without his permission. The burden to add that spice of humor at exactly the right place in your slides falls on these free comic strip sites which all use Creative Commons licenses.

Randall Munroe is the first name that pops up when we think of free webcomics and cartoons. His work is licensed under a “use it but don’t sell it” Creative Commons license. The comics are a sarcastic take on the world with some geekdom thrown in.

Now, if you are wondering what the title of the website means – don’t. According to Randall, it is just a word with no phonetic pronunciation.

Cartoons about anything and everything. The important distinction is that they are separated into neat categories like Art & Culture, Business, Education etc. Total them all up and you have 980 ways to draw a chuckle from your audience. Feel free to use them with a Creative Commons license.

If YouTube has a lifetime of videos, then GIPHY has the market for animated GIFs. Look past the funny GIFs you send with WhatsApp at the thousands of instructional animations on the site. Or just try the useful search engine on the site. I just searched for “internal combustion engine” and guess what – I got nearly 7000 hits!

You can’t stop Reddit when it is on a roll. Searching for just the right GIF can be a chore, but at least try it once on this sub-Reddit which houses educational GIFs of all kinds. Take a glance to the right and there are two sub-Reddits called gifrequests and makemeagif you can tap for some friendly assistance.

Surprised? Wikipedia is a rabbit hole for information and nearly 40 million freely usable media files hosted on Wikimedia. Supporting many of their pages are explainer GIFs under a Creative Commons license. For instance, try this comet impact GIF next time with a space topic.

If you want a hypnotic look through animated GIFs on Wikipedia try the WikiGifs project by Joel Franusic.

Did We Miss a Favorite Site?

The internet is chock a bloc with graphic freebies. The human problem is laying our hands on the right one at the right time. And with the boss breathing down your neck for the Monday morning presentation, speed becomes a vital factor for an impressive presentation.

You might want to also check out retrocod.com. Home movie clips from the 20s through the 70s available via metadata search. The clips may be used either individually or combined into videos that can easily be embedded into PowerPoint.

Saikat Basu is the Deputy Editor for Internet, Windows, and Productivity. After removing the grime of an MBA and a ten year long marketing career, he is now passionate about helping others improve their storytelling skills. He looks out for the missing Oxford comma and hates bad screenshots. But Photography, Photoshop, and Productivity ideas soothe his soul.